Numbers in the News Text (Based on Material of One Issue of Nationwide Newspaper “Day”)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the digital content of publications of one issue of the daily All-Ukrainian newspaper “Den” (March 13-14, 2020). The author aims to identify the main thematic groups of digital designations, as well as to consider cases of justified and unsuccessful use of digital designations. Applying the content analysis method, the author identifies publications that contain numerical notations, determines the number of such notations and their affiliation with the main subject groups. Finds that the thematic group of digital designations “time” (58.6% of all digital designations) is much more dominant. This indicates that timing is the most important task of a newspaper text. The second largest group of digital designations is “measure” (15.8% of all digital designations). It covers dimensions and proportions, measurements of distance, weight, volume, and more. The third largest group of digital signage is money (8.2% of all digital signage), the fourth is numbering (5.2% of all digital signage), and the fifth is people (4.4% of all digital signage). The author focuses on the fact that the digits of the journalist’s text are both a source of information and a catch for the reader. Vivid indicators give the text a sense of accuracy. When referring digital data to the text, journalists must adhere to certain rules for the writing of ordinal numbers with incremental graduation; submission of dates; pointing to unique integers that are combined (or not combined) with units of physical quantities, monetary units, etc.; writing a numerator at the beginning of a sentence; unified presentation of data. This will greatly facilitate the reader’s perception of the information.